comics & graphic novels

Hello everyone! Are you having a good New Year? ‘Cause I’m not, I have two essays due soon (sobs in despair). I realize I’ve been missing for a while, and it’s mostly because I haven’t actually read any books. There’s a bunch of sequels releasing this month, so fingers crossed. Meanwhile, have this short review.

The story follows Deadpool in his attempts to befriend Spiderman, who quit the Avengers for some vague reason I don’t get. Of course, since this is Deadpool, his ulterior motives have ulterior motives, so things are fairly complicated.

Guys, I made a discovery…It’s called digital comics. And here’s a review of one of the first ones I read – Sunstone, a breakout graphic novel that’s essentially a romance between main characters Ally and Lisa.

For some reason, I’ve decided this is the cat gif review.(shrugs)

Sunstone deals with what some people might call uncomfortable topics, but which will surprise no one who is acquainted with:
(a) fanfiction
(b) M/M romances
(c) anime fan-girls

I happen to be one of those people.

See the rest of the review here and hope that I manage to get through this year of uni without being distracted by all the shiny books.

After a really long time, our Goodreads group decided to do a buddy-read. And we picked a really interesting theme this time round…which led to me reading Amanda Conner’s Power Trip comic. It wasn’t too bad, all things considered:

Anyway, this is a fairly fun volume to read. I didn’t realize how big the page count was, so I kept wading through it, more and more confused. Then I glanced down (at my digital copy) and saw it was over 300 pages…

Most of PG’s random encounters with random villains, in the midst of a personal crisis about her identity. It’s more light-hearted after the initial Psycho-Pirate story, and generally I just found them vaguely entertaining, not riveting.

Can we just take a moment here to reflect on the fact that Psycho-Pirate looks and sounds like an antivirus software?

Hola! I have realized why some people might decide never to start reading comics. They come with a great deal of history, convoluted relationships and endless reboots that aren’t really reboots. Not knowing even one of these details can sometimes kill a book. And because there were things I didn’t know at the time of reading this Justice League volume, it kinda sucked:

But the reality was more like…

Some barely comprehensible backstory (I had to reread it to get the whole exchanging sons thing)Some randomly distributed murders by Darkseid’s generalissimo(or is it Antimonitor’s, I forget)Followed by this completely badass Darkseid’s daughter character(Grail?)whose motivations I don’t fully understandSome more backstory about Grail and a gibberish prophecy, also something about Luthor’s heartless sister, all randomThe Flash and Bats in CSI mode(I realize much later that this volume is part of DC Rebirth; until then confused by Flash’s presence)

Read the rest of my babbling here. In the mean time, how much are you dreading school on a scale of one to 10? A 100?

We’re returning to the Injustice series today and boy is it a painful experience. Good people dying left and right, bad people not dying but getting worse and horror of horrors, Superman’s suit now has yellow in it. It’s every primary color now!

Moving on to an excerpt.

The problem is that by definition, heroism seems to be wanting to believe the best of everyone, and this is why the DC Universe needed Batman. Otherwise their own gullibility would have killed off everyone by now. By this volume, Superman has been firmly entrenched as an irredeemable dictator who will kill off an entire planet and a young mother in a fit of rage; Hal Jordan has been established as a glitch in the Green Lantern system. I used to like him once. Not any more.

Remember when I got super excited after reading the first volume of the new Thor? We never find out the identity of the lady who is Thor now and after a long wait, the second volume came out. It wasn’t as great as I hoped, but not too bad either.

In the second volume of Thor, the central question is who lady Thor actually is, and old Thor (now Odinson) is running helter-skelter trying to solve the mystery of her identity. He doesn’t do a very good job of it, to be honest. Some other things are happening, which I have to strain to remember, but Freyja and Odin are steadily on the path to a divorce as Odin does what crotchety old men do best: act misogynistic and stubborn.
Actually, that might just be Odin.

With some difficulty, I’m managing to keep up the biweekly posting (wheezes). So forgive me if this review is not particularly helpful or entertaining, because I’m slightly running out of steam. I was intrigued by the cover of this particular comic and my intrigue stopped at the cover after I read it:

I thought Angela was part of the Asgardian mythology but here she seems to have nothing to do with it. Which is just confusing, because that’s the defining trait of the character? Also, who is this Serah person?

Read the review here and look forward to a hopefully cheerier post on Friday!

I seem to be on a streak of underwhelming comics lately. In this one, I review an attempt to have Robin join the Teen Titans, which even the writer abandons at the end:

Breaking News – The Damian Wayne Robin is a major sociopath and needs immediate fixing before he breaks Batman’s patience (which, considering it’s Dick Grayson, is no mean feat). It has been decided that the best way to deal with this is to drop him into a group of teenage heroes with their own issues. Stay tuned to see how well this does not work.